Forgotten Classic: AC Cars and A98, the Other Cobra Coupe

Even if you're a vintage racing fan (or maybe a racing fan of a certain vintage) the car pictured above may not look familiar, and may not remind you at all of the familiar AC Cobra.  But that could be because it only raced once, with a less successful outcome than its more famous sister cars from Shelby American.  It turns out that while the California firm was working long hours to ready Pete Brock's* Daytona coupe design below for the 1964 Le Mans, the AC factory in Thames Ditton, England was working on Alan Turner's design for the A98 coupe pictured above and below it... 

Turner and Brock were both aiming at better aerodynamics with less frontal area and also more downforce at the rear, and both designers achieved that in different ways. On Turner's A98, as with John Willment's* 289 Cobra, the other one-off Cobra racing coupe, the nose is sharper in profile and the roof is lower than on Brock's Daytona, which is all gentle curves from the rounded nose back to the abrupt Kamm-insipired tail chop with that tall spoiler, which Brock wanted to be retractable, a feature Shelby vetoed for cost reasons.  Even the flat, recessed tail outlines the ovoid section of the car. On Turner's A98 design, pictured above the blue Daytona, the rear section is more rectilinear, and the spoiler more angled. There are sharply defined blisters above A98's wheel arches to direct air flow, and these recall the Mercedes 300SL and SLR.  Both designs added rigidity to the chassis, improving handling, and added speed. The Daytona coupe was timed at 191 mph, and AC's A98 became famous (or notorious) even before Le Mans when test driver Jack Sears was timed at 185 mph in a pre-dawn run on a public highway, Britain's M1 Motorway...

In the photo above, the A98's tubular steel framework waits for the aluminum body panels that would be fabricated by AC.  For the Daytona Cobra, Shelby American formed the first alloy body over a wooden buck in Los Angeles; subsequent "production" cars (all 5 of them) were built by Carrozzeria Gran Sport in Italy.  Shelby had funding for only 6 coupes, so the British teams fielded by the AC factory and by Ford dealer John Willment* had to make their own.  Shelby and AC took advantage of the race organizing body FIA's Appendix J rules to fit their production Cobra roadsters with non-standard aerodynamic coupe bodies. Enzo Ferrari had used the same rule to get his GTO approved, and was upset that AC and Shelby had made far fewer of their cars than the 3 dozen 250 GTOs he presented as mere variations on the 250GT.  He was even more upset when the Daytona helped Shelby American's AC Cobra team to win the Manufacturer's Championship, beating Ferrari in 1965...

In fairness to Shelby and AC, though, we'd point out that the alloy bodies on the Daytona and A98 really were mounted on standard AC Cobra chassis, while the Ferrari GTO featured a dry-sump engine never available in the production 250GT.  In the photos above and below, the lone A98 Le Mans Cobra emerges from the AC factory at Thames Ditton.  Note the sharp crease above the air intake, and the low profile...A98 was just 41 inches high, 5.5 inches lower than the Daytona.  AC's test driver Jack Sears was the only one to have raced all three types of Cobra coupes along with the roadster. In comparing them, he noted that the more rigid Daytona handled better than the "bucking bronco" roadster, but was hot and "deafening" in long-distance races.  He thought the Willment coupe felt almost the same as the Daytona, but noted the lower profile.  Finally, he thought that AC's A98 might have been "the best of the lot", with great speed in a straight line, as well as predictable handling and stability...

At Le Mans in 1964, early indications were that Sears was right.  A98 matched the speed of the Daytonas, even with less power than the Shelby-tuned coupes. The car Sears shared with Peter Bolton ran well after the mechanics sorted out a mess caused by someone sabotaging the fuel tank with shredded newspaper.  Then, in the 7th hour, A98 blew a tire with Bolton driving, was hit by Giancarlo Baghetti's Ferrari, and jumped the guardrail.  Tragically, three teenagers who'd ignored restricted area warnings were in the path of the wrecks, and died.  Bolton was taken to the hospital with amazingly minor injuries, and Baghetti escaped unhurt.  Years later, Barrie Baird bought the wreck of A98 and restored the car.  The process took a dozen years... 

It's one of those tantalizing "what ifs" to ponder what might have happened without the sabotaged fuel tank, the blown tire, and the deadly accident at Le Mans. Those who remember A98 at Le Mans, along with many who have seen the restored original, have noted that it may have provided a template for an AC production car when the aging Cobra roadster had run its course*.  It may have been difficult, though, to adapt this A98 design, or that of the Daytona, to the coming US safety standards, and the bumper standards that would follow those.  For AC and for Shelby, the Cobra was a hard act to follow, but that's a story we've covered in another episode*.

*Footnote:  We compared the Cobra Daytona coupe with the less well-known (okay, mostly forgotten) Willment Cobra competition coupe and Willment 427 Ghia coupe in our previous post, Forgotten Classic: Willment Cars---Climax, BRM, and Those One-Off Cobras, posted Feb. 11, 2023.  We surveyed a selection of AC Cobras in the Shelby American Collection in Roadside Attraction: The Shelby American Collection Part 1, on Dec. 28, 2017.  For more on the original Cobra Daytona along with other designs by Pete Brock, you might visit Unsung Genius: Pete Brock, Car Designer, posted here on Jan. 16, 2017. A survey of proposed successors to the Shelby AC Cobra roadster appears in AC Part 4: Shelby's Cobra Was a Hard Act to Follow, posted on Aug. 20, 2017.

Photo credits:

Top:  pinterest.co.uk

2nd:  the author

3rd thru 5th:  AC Cars Ltd. on primotipo.com

Bottom:  AC Owners Club

Forgotten Classic: Willment Cars----Climax, BRM and Those One-Off Cobras

Around 1957, if you'd been reading car mags like Road & Track or the long-defunct Sports Cars Illustrated, you might have seen a little feature on the car shown above and below.  It's a sports racing car built by Englishman John Willment, with alloy bodywork by Williams & Pritchard, a firm that also built the bodies for Colin Chapman's Lotus 11.  The sharp crease surmounting the low air intake and linking the headlights is a distinctive design touch. 

The low profile, tubular chassis, alloy wheels and Coventry Climax single overhead cam engine, an 1100cc inline four designed a fire pump engine, were all the rage in British club racing circles at the time.  The Willment's stabilizing fins, unlike those on the Lotus IX which had also been built by Williams & Pritchard, were deftly integrated into the body design with a horizontal crease curving up past flush tail lights and forward to the cabin.  This crease echoes the one linking the headlights on 407 H.  The frontal forms of the earlier Willment shown below, from 1956, were not so well integrated...

But the cars drew attention to the competitive talents of John Willment, who had designed an inlet over exhaust cylinder head for the old Ford side-valve fours before adopting the Climax engine, and expanding a chain of Ford dealerships that supported his racing activity.  In winter of 1962, Willment founded his own racing team, perfectly timed to run the Lotus Cortinas that would arrive in 1963, alongside the big V8 Galaxies, in saloon car racing.  But 1962 was also the first year of Carroll Shelby's Ford-powered AC Cobra, and Willment noticed the potential of that car early on. By 1964, when Shelby produced half a dozen Daytona coupes that would eventually help win the '65 Manufacturer's Championship, Willment wanted one for his team...

And in 1964, because Shelby declined to make him one, Willment acquired Cobra 289 chassis number CSX2131 and made one himself, with assistance from Daytona crew chief John Ohlsen, and copies of Pete Brock's drawings lent by Shelby American.  The roof seems a bit lower on CSX2131 than on the Daytona, and the rear wheel arches as shown in the early photo above are flatter. 

The frontal form of the Willment Cobra coupe closely follows Pete Brock's* design for the original Daytona, with a slightly more angled profile to the nose.  At first glance, it seems the high tail of the fastback coupe is also in line with the original...

Conveniently enough, the Shelby American Collection in Boulder, Colorado has one of the original Cobra Daytona Coupes on hand, so you can go over and have a look to compare the cars.  Pete Brock wanted an adjustable spoiler that could be raised for downforce as speed increased, but Shelby vetoed this on budgetary grounds.  Even so, the Daytona body added roughly 20 mph to the Cobra's top speed.

On closer examination, you note that the rear window of the John Willment Team car is recessed and nearly vertical, somewhat like the Ferrari GTO Series 2.  But this change was made in the 70s,  The original Willment coupe had a curving, flush backlight, as shown in the monochrome photo. It is not known whether Willment chose the red paint scheme in protest of Shelby's refusal to sell him a body shell.  It was maybe a coincidence that it was also the color of the Ferraris that Shelby was trying to beat...or maybe not.

Still, red color and all, Willment's CSX2131, the Almost Daytona, did well on the track, winning the Guards Trophy at Brands Hatch in '65, driven by Jack Sears, who had also driven the Daytonas.  

A comparison of the blue Daytona with the red Almost Daytona also shows how closely Willment's team followed Brock's body forms around the cowl, windshield and A-pillar.  Note also the boundary layer air control devices added to the Daytona's A-pillar; this was identified in tests as one of the few aerodynamic hiccups on Brock's design.

This was a busy time for the Willment team, as they also entered the stream of mid-engined road racers with a small series using the BRM V8, in 2 liter form an enlarged version of the 1.5 liter, 4-cam engine that Graham Hill had used to win BRM* a Formula 1 World Championship in 1962.  The red car below was built for the 1965 road racing season...

...while this blue one was built for 1966.  Old race photos show at least one BRM-powered Willment coupe with gull-wing doors; it appears this may have been converted to an open car later on.

One of the models in the display case at the Shelby Collection is this Ghia Supersonic from 1953-54, a design which appeared on a small number of Fiat 8Vs, at least one Jaguar special, and one Aston Martin.  What is it doing here?

Well, it's here because when Shelby introduced the 427 Cobra with its new, computer-designed chassis (a first, courtesy of Ford) with larger-diameter tubes, Willment wanted a coupe version.  Shelby apparently wasn't any more interested in making a 427 coupe than he had been in selling Willment a Daytona, so Willment adapted a Ghia-built alloy body from a 2 liter Fiat 8V Supersonic*.  During this period, it was probably easier to find a Fiat 8V with a blown engine than it is today; now these cars are so valuable that engines get restored along with the rare alloy bodies, and nobody would throw away the scarce Fiat 8V chassis, which like the AC Ace that formed the basis of the Cobra, featured a pioneering 4-wheel independent suspension.

The rear fenders of the Willment Ghia* Cobra had to be re-contoured to allow for the wider track on the 427; pretty much the same thing that happened to the rear fenders on the 289 roadster in the change to the 427, which appeared in 1967. The front fenders, grille opening and bumpers of Giovanni Savonuzzi's design were left unchanged, a good choice...

This car still exists, and has been featured on a website showcasing the glories of Italian coachwork, in this case, the Fiat Supersonic designed, like the original AC Ace, nearly a decade before the first Shelby AC Cobra turned a wheel...

Were there other Cobra coupes beyond those six blue Daytonas, the defiantly red Willment 289 Almost Daytona, and the 427 that hides under Willment's adapted Ghia Supersonic bodywork?  Well, yes, there is an authentic one, designed and built by AC Cars and racing at Le Mans in the 1964 photo below.  It's number 3.  But that car is a story for a future installment of we might call "Other Cobras You Forgot"...

*Footnote: We featured the Cobras in the Shelby American Collection in Roadside Attraction: The Shelby American Collection Part 1, on Dec. 28, 2017.  For more on the original Cobra Daytona along with other designs by Pete Brock, you might visit Unsung Genius: Pete Brock, Car Designer, posted here on Jan. 16, 2017.  The BRM V8, V16, and H16 engines are described, along with pictures of Old Faithful, the Championship-winning BRM, in The BRM Saga: Learning From History, Or Not, posted Oct. 15, 2018.  And for more info on the Fiat 8V and the Ghia Supersonic, you might want to check out The Etceterini Files Part 10:  Siata 208S & Fiat 8V, in the blog archives for Nov. 13, 2016.  There's a later Ghia Cobra design on the 427 chassis, and it was commissioned by Ford.  A survey of proposed successors to the Shelby AC Cobra roadster, including Ghia designs for Ford and AC, appears in AC Part 4: Shelby's Cobra Was a Hard Act to Follow, posted on Aug. 20, 2017.

Photo Credits:  

Top & 2nd:  Williams & Pritchard

3rd:  pinterest.com

4th:  secondstrike.com

5th thru 11th (Willment Cobra & Daytona):  the author

12th ('65 Willment BRM):  pinterest.com

13th & 14th ('66 Willment BRM):  autopuzzles.com

15th:  the author

16th:  gentlemanracer.com

17th:  autopuzzles.com

18th:  carrozzieri-italiani.com

Bottom:  AC Owners Club